Kinodance merges the talents of artists of myriad stripes - choreographer/dancers Alissa Cardone and Ingrid Schatz, filmmaker Alla Kovgan, visual artist Dedalus Wainwright, musician/composer Roger Miller (Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra), and lighting designer Kathy Couch - to posit an "intermedia" world of flashing lights, bodies, and sounds onstage.
The two pieces the company presented last night both take their inspiration from a technological "advance" of years gone by. Viewers would do well to read the program notes before the show begins; yes, a work of art should be able to stand on its own. But knowing the history goes a long way toward clarifying meaning here.
And "meaning" is about sensation - what you feel - not so much what you can translate into words.
"Behemoth" - to a now-throbbing, now-thrumming, now-screeching sound score by Jessica Rylan - recasts the 18-century ocular harpsichord as a barrel-shaped cage of slats dangling from the ceiling. As Cardone, in poufy white, jabs an elbow here, or squats and spins there, Rylan, in vivid red, sits at a console and manipulates knobs that appear to set the scene in motion. The projections on the cage can set you reeling: Lights morph from a chain-link fence to crossword puzzle's crossings to black flames on a dark night.
"Fuse" springs partly from Kinodance's fascination with the "lumia box," a unit with a screen resembling a TV set invented by light artist Thomas Wilfred in the '20s and '30s. Wilfred programmed the thing to play colorful, dynamic light shows of spectacular imagery. Kinodance takes the concept and runs with it, crafting a narrative inspired by the film "Blade Runner," with characters (four women: one in red, one in white tails, one in a punked-up tutu, one in Amazonian glitter) who cavort, hang, flip, gyrate inside or outside a giant box encased in taut gauze on which and through light splinters into confetti, explodes into wide green bands or windows, erupts in pink bubbles or ribbons of fire.
